Campaigners from the Fifth Pillar charity, which confronts corrupt officials using freedom of information legislation, have issued notes bearing the image of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of its freedom struggle

Chennai: At the second-floor office of 5th Pillar, a three-year-old Chennai-based non-governmental organization (NGO), 40-year-old Vijay Anand vociferously evangelizes to a crowd of 25 people on a Saturday evening. He urges the group—a mix of students and working professionals who are there to learn about how to get information on public officials—to fight corruption and shame corrupt government workers by offering the zero- rupee note that contains the promise to neither accept nor pay a bribe.

In a country where corruption is embedded in everyday life, encouraging someone to hand over yet another banknote to a grabbing hand might not seem the best way to stop the problem. Read More.

An Indian U of Maryland physics prof came up with these zero rupee notes that Indians can slip to officials who demand bribes. They’ve been wildly successful, with a total run over over 1,000,000 notes, and the reports from the field suggest that they shock grafters into honesty. Fifth Pillar is the NGO that produces the notes, and they’re available for download in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

I was forced to mull on this question by the runway popularity of a recent post by Fumiko Nagano on the World Bank blog regarding the efforts of 5th Pillar to fight Corruption in India with Zero Rupee Notes. Since then, it has taken the digital world by storm with several hundred twitterattis including @ShashiTharoor and @Gulpanag retweeting its link and several prominent websites including The Economist, CNN, Boing Boing featuring related posts.

The seemingly constant redesigning of U.S. currency and the rise of the design-community-approved, architecture-centric Euro (only the Netherlands could get away with a coin this cool) has led to a wave of art and design projects that toy with what our money looks like, and what it says about us. (DesignBoom has a great round-up here, but they missed my favorite, the Lil’ Rhody-themed Noney.)

A new design for the Indian rupee has a more immediate message. Indians pressured into giving bribes can now flash this zero-rupee note instead. The Indian NGO Fifth Pillar has been handing out the fake bills for a few years now, and they say they’ve put more than one million into circulation.